The Unstoppable Lena Rowat

I love finding off-the-radar stories like this one about a woman who makes many more famous "extreme" athletes look like pillow fighters. Lena Rowat isn't going to be doing Sharon Stone fashion shoots anytime soon but if I needed a partner to survive a winter backcountry adventure I can't think of anybody else I'd choose ahead of her. Among other things, Rowat has skied from Vancouver to the Yukon (over the top of 19,000' Mt Logan), most of it in a single push. Here's a good article on her adventures, which should help you enjoy winter so much more.

The Unstoppable Lena Rowat

Here's another great article about part of that adventure.

The Long White Line

“When I look back on this trip, what strikes me most is how low-key it was. There was no documentary, no magazine feature, no fanfare. It was exceptionally driven young people chipping away, kilometre after kilometre, day after day, month after month, at something so big, that if examined in its entirety, seems impossible. They were out there only for themselves, as if on a journey to explore their own backyard. It just happened that their backyard was the Coast Mountains. I think there’s something really pure to that. I feel to this day that the little section I spent skiing through those mountains with those guys on their epic journey is precious.”

12 Days of Psyche: Mountain Epics

For your 12th day of Psyche I present... Christmas. For your gift here are a few snowy adventures from climbing prodigy David Lama. As a teenager he dominated the World Cup circuit before parlaying his talents in the mountains. He's already doing some of the hardest and most coveted alpine ascents in history and is basically just warming up as he learns a new craft. We can't even imagine what the future holds.

Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas everyone! The 'dope will get back to business after the first of the year.

12 Days of Psyche: Girls Killin' It

... on hard, local boulders. Here are two vids of Brit Mina Leslie-Wujastyk on a recent trip, making mincemeat of some of America's hardest boulder problems. There's also a short synopsis about the trip in Rock & Ice, punctuated with her thoughts on heading back to training after the trip.

As we turn the corner into real winter, Leslie-Wujastyk, though liking outdoor climbing best, is unperturbed to face gym days.

“I like training,” she says mildly. “I like trying hard. I get a kick out of seeing the improvement.”



And since I said "girls", here's Alex Johnson flashing a very scary V9. And she looks casual. Super rad.

12 Days of Psyche: Why We Climb

This is a great interview with the late Patrick Edlinger. I don't generally find climbing interviews inspiring but this one is different. "Le Blond's" views don't seem tainted with jealously or disdain about the new generation, which is so common it's become cliche. He's extremely positive and insightful, and also gets at the heart of why we climb.

"You're obliged to to focus on here and now. To concentrate totally. All of a sudden you forget your problems. The things that don't interest you."

We also get to hear the story of Ceuse, still probably the single best climbing cliff on earth. How he stumbled upon it on the eve of a trip to the US, tore up his tickets, and stayed there for the next four years. It's like a climbing dream (literally for me as I've had so many dreams of finding epic crags I can't begin to remember them all.)

But, since an interview isn't enough for Psyche, here some "Dreammaker" action from 1982, the brilliant film Life By Your Fintertips. It's got one-arm pinky pull-ups, doing the splits between boulders, a sweet van, high white pants, German techo music about robots, drum solos; basically anything you'd need to get motivated to climb.

12 Days of Psyche: Making Weight

Since it's the weekend and you theoretically have more time, here's a pretty cool movie that's on Netflix play it now called Occupation: Fighter (also on Amazon et al). It's about a no-name fighter training for his shot at the title. It's a pretty good movie but if you aren't into fighting you can load it and just watch the best part, which comes near the end as he's training for his big night and then has to make weight. This section of the film is AWESOME. As anyone who's wrestled well knows, making weight sucks. It's interesting here to see how things have gotten more systematic but that doesn't really make it any easier. It looks miserable and will certainly help you get through your next workout when life has you feeling like eating donuts instead. He also takes a full body ice bath (a couple of shots make the trailer), which is another one of those I'm-more-dedicated-than-you moments. All in all, it's one of those movies that reminds you that you could be training harder. Get after it!

12 Days of Psyche: Buildering

Here's a 3- part Psyche for your Friday. When I first began climbing we buildered all the time. Gyms didn't exist and real rock was a pain to get to so we made up all sorts of circuits on the UCLA campus. Next, during the start of the sport climbing movement, routes of glued-on holds under highway underpasses became all the rage until,eventually, gyms became the standard and buildering mainly disappeared. These three vids show that it's still alive and well in some parts of the world. The first looks like better climbing. The second one come with this claim,

"At 2:42 min you will find a boulder called "FEINDESLIEBE" (EnemyLove) Font 8B+/8C, and in my opinion the hardest builder in the world."

I'm not sure how the guy would know, given it's a sport based on mainly lore (not to mention it's often illegal) but, whatever, it's pretty cool (click on the quote) and almost makes we want to look for some urban circuits around here.

Finally, we have an actual climbing vid that also features some buildering and makes it look pretty creative--perhaps even more fun than the route.

12 Days of Psyche: Snowy Mountain Biking

Cool vid of hittin' the trails, roads, and bike parks around SLC and Park City in winter, from local company Boo bikes, a bamboo bike maker. Local is a world prospective, as Boo is located in Colorado, but they're main riding, Tyler Wren, hails from Utah.

This is a lot like what my winter's looking like. Some of the Yak attack's going to look like this and I've got to be used to it.

12 Days of Psyche: Rad Blind Guy

Dogs, friends, climbing, nature; what more do you need? Apparently not much. I have to say that I'm not usually inspired by stories of handicapped folks doing stuff. Not that they personally wouldn't inspired me, because I'm sure they would, but because those videos are almost always presented in the same hyperbolized light, as if there was a fundraising event about to follow. Drives me nuts because I find it embarrassing for everyone involved. Anyways, this video is not like that at all. It's just a guy out there, living life and having fun. And it's friggin' great. And super inspiring. And it's at the cliffs near Bruce and Alisa's home. And he has a very special dog.

12 Days of Psyche: Power Climbing

I love this style of climbing, which is a hybrid of bouldering and climbing. Routes like these require total focus once you leave the ground. You can never rest, or even recover, and the added element of rope and gear make them feel much different from bouldering. It's not the kind of thing most people associate with climbing, where the common sentiment is higher, longer, better. But the way I look at it, the longer a route is the easier the movements must be, leaving for more margin for error. Short climbing require, as Todd Skinner said, "laser-like focus". Most of my favorite routes have been similar.

12 Days of Psyche: Record on the Tour Divide

Here's a short but inspiring vid about the guy who set the Tour Divide record. This has to be one of the most grueling physical challenges out there. It also seems a bit boring unless you're wired like this guy. Given it runs more or less through my backyard, one of these years I might have to try and get enough time off work to give 'er a shot. For more about the race, you can now stream Ride the Divide (a documentary about the TD) on Netflix: Ride the Divide

12 Days of Psyche: Climbing Alone

The Almighty: A Climbing Story with Tyrel Mack from Fisher Creative on Vimeo.

Yesterday's Loskot vid got me thinking about climbing alone. I might have climbed alone in my life more than with other people. I certainly do at the moment. Now it's because I'm busy and never sure when I'll have some time. Once it was because I was so un-busy that I couldn't find others with enough free time to always be out. In actuality, much of it's choice. I like being outside, in nature, alone. Because everyone else seems to think it's so weird I enjoy vids like this, if just to remind me that there are others out there like me. Today's Psyche has a totally different tone but what it lacks in rad is made up for in mood, at least in my opinion. So there.

12 Days of Psyche: Klem

How do you one-up Haston? You don't, but Klem Loskot is back to climbing and that's pretty cool. He was always one of the biggest characters in the sport. Not just because he was strong and put up ground-breaking ascents, but because his style of both finding the routes and recording them were, well, different. He's was always off the beaten track and always very.... something. Austrian? The video is one example.

He quit climbing for some years but is back and, apparently, still very strong. Here's a really good interview on Rock & Ice. Click the excerpt for the rest.

It matters a lot because it gives you access to the flow, the feeling of climbing weightless, dancing up with smooth moves. It’s amazing, like in skiing or surfing! This feeling is what "sport" is all about. It is hard to get it in climbing because you need to be very fit.

12 Days of Psyche: 1500 Pull-ups

Fuckin’ Stevie Haston, man! Psyche doesn’t always require video. Reading Stevie’s blog is like one long strange Psyche trip. This guy is, what, 55 years old? He’s been bolting all day (harder than climbing) and he comes home and rattles off 1500 pull-ups. It’s just so.. SO… rad. Then he posts this:

A perfect bolted a brilliant route, radiant sunset. . Got home and did 1500 pull ups on the board..... Still haven't mastered the small sloper with one hand, anyway there is always tomorrow...

So, yeah, in the midst of all this he’s trying to hang a hold at his power limit. I don’t care if none of this sounds sensible because this guy’s older than me, stronger than me, and out training me. He wins.

Today I did a lot, me happy if I can keep it up for a couple of months I will improve. Simple Innit?
- Stevie un-bored Haston

Revisiting Psyche

Yesterday Bob Banks posted an article titled Revisiting Psyche. The gist of it is that he ran across an old bouldering guide (written by me) that he had all marked up in his quest to do every problem in it and couldn't believe how psyched he'd once been.

Today I picked up my old copy of Edwards' Santa Barbara Bouldering (1997) and thumbed through it for the first time in over a decade. Marked on the inside cover with my name and The Castle phone number should I lose it, it's quite a walk down memory lane. The book is bound together with a rubber band, torn up and marked up with scribbled field notes and comments on nearly every page. At my current state of climbing psyche, it's hard to believe how psyched I once was, spending every rest day walking through the hills looking for more stuff.

We all move on in life. Bob went on with those notes to write the definitive book on Santa Barbara bouldering. But this is a cool post for another reason. Reminiscing of bygone days also plants seeds. Those days are gone, sure, but reflecting on them helps create new ideas, dreams, and motivation.

It's inevitable that priorities shift and single-minded focus becomes fractured. But with life comes experience. An invaluable tool for sorting things out efficiently. "Youth is wasted on the young," said everyone's favorite wit spewer, Oscar Wilde. It's a sentiment hard to argue with,especially doing a workout at P3 or seeing teenage girls do this. But I do fight it or, more accurately, roll with it pretending it's not happening. My life is better than it was, I can continually improve it, and there are still lifetime goals out there, even purely physical ones, to be obtained before I ride off into the sunset.

Finally, it's important to note that I am not alone in this belief. I can be a tad optimistic, as Bob likes to point out, but I'm still getting stuff done and there's no good reason that you can't, too. Thanks to my job I get to witness people who change their lives on a daily basis, at almost any age. And while we never get our youth back we simply don't need to. We can do anything we want. And we can do it now.

pic: cover lore - yes, that's tuco the rat, standing on top of one of the better boulder problems i've established. more shockingly, it's phil 1) bouldering 2) outside 3)not at the tor. finally, it's a jason houston shot, bringing back even more memories of psyche and singlemindedness.

Warriors for the Working Day

I love December. Not for the holidays and indulgence, but because it’s the month I reflect on past year of training and get to re-shuffle the deck and create a new template for what’s next.

The year’s wane is always a ghost town here at ‘the Dope. I’ve had over 2 million readers, and less than 1% of them have engaged in December. So I’m dedicating this month to my friends and the die hards interested enough in training to still be reading about it when the rest of the great unwashed is reveling to the point of disgust, hoping it will motivate them to make a proper New Year’s resolution.

This month I won’t distill for the masses. It’ll just be straight talk on training, motivation, and other assorted oddities that will hopefully be amusing and, if you don’t get it, it’s on you to catch up. God’s will I pray thee wish not one man more.

We few, we happy few. We band of brothers. For he who sheds his blood with me will be my brother. Be here ne’re so vile, this (month) shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in (America), now a-bed, shall think themselves accursed that they’re not here, and hold their manhood’s cheap, while any speaks who fought with us...

Adventure Monday: Turkey

After countless breakfasts, lunches, dinners and even dreams, this summer the time finally came to remove the photo off the kitchen wall.

Here's an outstanding account of an off-the-beaten-track adventure in the mountains of Turkey, not a place generally associated with high-end alpinism. My favorite part is how well it conveyed the games climbers play in their heads dreaming of ascents. Most of these go unfinished. It's much easier to spy a line up a rock face than it is to make it a reality, especially in far off lands. But without such visions our sport would not exist. Occasionally we live our dreams, and this is a tale of one of those times. Be sure and click through to the photos at the bottom. There are still many amazing remote areas left to be explored. For those of us with an inkling of adventurous spirit, it's guaranteed to set your mind in motion.

The story of the new route on Cima Vay Vay dates back to 2005. It was then that Larcher first heard about the great wall of splendid limestone from his friend Recep Ince - the alpinist and owner of the campiste that has always been the base for climbing expeditions in this mountain chain. Ince knows these mountains like the back of his hand, far better than anyone else and a year later the first "contact" came about. "I set off with Recep" explained Larcher "and after walking for two long days, having climbed over numerous passes, following no path at all and with only a rough map which ended 2/3 of the way there, we finally reached the Barazama waterfalls. We bivied ad the foot of the majestic Vay Vay amphitheatre and managed to photograph the face in the fleeting early morning light... At home I hung this photo up in my kitchen and I knew that, sooner or later, its time would come."

And there, at 3000m, is another clue as to why someone can be so in love with such cumbersome toils. For they were awaited by "an idyllic place, a hectare of happiness, a place of tranquillity amid the moraine. It was our small, provisional paradise: a perfectly trimmed lawn ideal for our tents, a snowfield to the side which acted as a fridge, a crystal clear lake fed by a stream, two boulders which provided shade on rest days, both in the morning and in the afternoon..." And, what is more, this was all located directly opposite Vay Vay, that authentic sheet of rock, 1 km wide, 600 meters high and even with glacier at its base. Marvelous!

Hardest Onsight, Climbing Circus Tricks, & More

Weather's looking perfect for a long weekend (at least here) so get outside and do something to earn your feast. For inspiration, here's the hardest route ever onsighted, courtesy of Black Diamond and, of course, Adam Ondra.

We don't exactly know it's the hardest but Ondra onsighted two 9as this day, downrating both, and said this one was harder. Since both would be the world's first 9a onsight we're assuming the title. Anyway, it's pretty clear from the vid that he can go deeper. Very, very impressive climbing from the guy with, by far, the most impressive climbing tick list in the world.



However, until he onsights something like this (go to 1:20) he can still raise the bar. The move in this video (maybe onsighted--have no idea) is the most bizarre climbing move I've ever seen. It's like a circus trick and I had to watch it 5 times to figure out what happened. Competition climbing has changed to the point where it's almost more like watching Cirque Du Soleil than how people ascend a rock face.



Check out this last video of a climbing comp from the 80s. Quite a difference, eh?

Don't Let Night Ruin Your Day

Here's a cool video on running at night. Headlamp technology has become so good that darkness isn't nearly the obstacle to adventure that it once was, and not just for running. It's becoming more and more commonplace to plan hard climbing routes at night (Caldwell et al worked on these pitches in the dark), which seems insane. And for tomorrow's challenge I'm charging my batteries right now.

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. Work and organizing my birthday challenge have my time pretty well used up. Upside is that I'm saving up some good stuff for the New Year when more people are paying attention.

Rock Tasting

"People go to France to taste wine. I came to England to taste rock." - Caroline Cialvaldini

In need of a some Psyche to get your Monday going? Thanks Hot Aches productions for making their film, The Odyssey, is available to download from free for the next week by going here.

The Odyssey follows four climbers on a tour to some of England's most history trad climbing locations. This means, aside from a lot of varied and beautiful scenery, in lieu of the standard crank-o-philia associated with most climbing vids you get your trad on with a heaping dose of scary.

The crew, all world-class (professional) climbers, take Joe Brown's "if ya didn't fall off you must not 'av climbed anything 'ard then" philosophy to the hilt and take to the air regularly. They all have amazingly good heads, laughing where average climbers tend to freak out, but the seriousness of what they're doing still comes out in subtle ways. It's a very different look at climbing than what's played up in the media. Truly scary falls are somewhat rare in climbing films. If you miss that aspect, this is film for you.

Punks, El Cap, and The Red

October may be the best month for climbing but early Nov tends to have the best days. So it's hardly surprising that rad stuff is happening all over that place. As usual, it starts with Adam Ondra...

Fresh off establishing the world’s hardest route, Ondra came to the US for the first time, heading straight for the only place with enough hard climbing to entertain him, in theory anyway. A few days ago he flashed a 9a+ and, yesterday, he onsighted two 9as. He downgraded all of these but we must keep in mind that nobody had ever onsighted a single 9a, much less two in a day, or flashed 9a+. Adam has onsighted more 8c+ than the rest of the world put together so, as Jonathan Seigrist suggested, he may be too strong to know. Or maybe he’s just being modest. Uk CLimbing has a full report here. The downgrades won't really stick until confirmed.

Speaking of Siegrist, he’s on El Cap with Tommy Caldwell on the latter’s decade-long Yosemite odyssey with what will be, by far, the hardest wall route in the world should anyone ever do it. Siegrist offers this great post where he shed’s some light on the difficulty of this monster. Maybe Ondra should head to The Valley.



My favorite post by far, however, comes from Oz where October doesn’t even matter. Mayan Smith-Gobat has given Punks in the Gym, the world’s first 5.14, its first female ascent. But it’s not the route or the grade that made her tale special. It’s her personal relationship with the climb. Realizing life long dreams is very cool, especially when they take this much effort. Mayan nails the travails of just how hard redpoints at your absolute limit can be.

Punks in the Gym put me through a full range of emotions. It caused me a huge amount of frustration, forced me to examine myself and my motivations for climbing. Before heading down to Australia on this last trip, I seriously debated the amount of effort I have invested, and whether it was really worth it… Eventually, I came to the realization that this route does hold a special importance to me. Therefore, I chose to sacrifice other goals and put a month into training specifically for this route. As a result, I felt much stronger this year. However, it was still a struggle… both mentally and physically.

vids: mayan’s been on an incredible roll lately. she’s also free climbed el cap so, since the punk footage is lacking, the el cap vid picks up the slack. she’s makes some nice observations on why we bother with such nonsense as climbing and, if you’re intro freeing big walls, she gives you blow by blow beta on the crux of the salathe—-incidentally another monumental climb and the first big route to get freed on el cap. the pitch she’s describing in the vid was so out there at the time that most of the climbing world didn’t believe it had really gone free.