Passing Away

Seems like death is in the air at the moment.  With the passing of the three very well known climbers recently (Micah, Johnny, Wade), then a friend’s friend passed away, and now a close friend of mine too: Chris Hale.

I really appreciated Chris’ presence.  He had qualities such as being soft-spoken, honest and up front about who he is, and calm that I notice and relate to.  We met while living in Gainesville, Florida, enjoyed many bouldering days indoors at the Gainesville Rock Gym and outdoors in Tennessee to where he moved.  Recently he went on a climbing spree around the country, climber-bum-style, and we kept trying to meet up but I put it off because of finishing my PhD.  He suprised me by being the only friend who was like: “chill Bruno, relax, don’t worry about it, we will have plenty of climbing trips once you are done with that.  Focus on that for now.”  I have needed that support and used his words in some dark dark times recently.

I’m really going to miss him.  At the same time, every climbing experience has always been about the friends I am with at the time and I have a knowing that he will be very present every time I step into the zone of climbing.  This is not thought based, it really is a felt-sense, and it is pleasant to feel that.

Video

Chris was working at Yosemite, having just recently started, and it seems that he was reported missing on Sunday morning.  On Monday morning his body was found near Mirror Lake.  Those are the facts.

Then there are the speculations.  The first person to tell me about his passing mentioned that she had heard that he was soloing.  Thus he most likely fell.  However, I then talked to someone who knows Yosemite like the palm of her hand and she was like “give me a minute, I’m trying to think of what he could have possibly been climbing there…”.  On a press release on Monday the park rangers say he must have fallen of while climbing but on Tuesday “a spokeswoman for the National Parks Service said investigators do not believe Hale was rock climbing at the time.”

There is some incompleteness for me still.  Aside from my desire for him to be alive the incompleteness comes from not feeling certain about the falling-while-free-soloing story.  Chris was a good climber, not super solid, his legs and arms would sorta jitter when he climbed hard, but I think he was a conscious climber.  I look forward to a more conclusive report on this.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20090616/ARTICLES/906169894/1002?Title=Ex-Gainesville-rock-climber-was-pursuing-his-passion

“

Ex-Gainesville rock climber was pursuing his passion

By Christopher Curry
Staff writer

Published: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 6:17 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 6:17 p.m.

Christopher Hale enjoyed acting and playing chess, but friends say his true passion was rock climbing.

This week, Hale, 23, a former Gainesville resident and Eastside High graduate, died doing what he loved – traveling to state and national parks across the country seeking rock formations to climb and conquer.

“He was spending a few years of his life really enjoying himself,” friend Lee Friedlander said. “He was traveling and climbing. It was what he wanted to do.”

On Sunday, Hale was reported missing in Yosemite National Park in California, where he planned to spend the summer working and climbing. His body was found Monday afternoon. It is believed Hale fell from a cliff.

Friedlander and Hale met a few years back at the Gainesville Rock Gym, where Hale was well known and well liked. In the fall of 2006, Hale moved to Chattanooga, Tenn., the closest rock-climbing destination to Gainesville. Several months later, Friedlander moved there as well.

He recalled how Hale would invite friends up from Gainesville to go rock climbing in Chattanooga and then end up gladly hosting at least 20 people in his one bedroom apartment, cooking breakfast for them each morning.

“He was just a really, really nice guy, very giving,” said friend C.P. Santos, who also met Hale at the Gainesville Rock Gym.

Santos, who now lives in Colorado, said he last spoke to Hale on Thursday. At that time, Hale was excited about a summer job he had taken at Yosemite National Park and his plans to spend the next few months climbing there.

On Sunday morning , Hale, who was working for the park’s largest concessionaire, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts at Yosemite Inc., was reported missing. Park rangers found his body at about 1 p.m. Monday and said in a released statement that it appears Hale fell from “an an unnamed cliff face above Mirror Lake in eastern Yosemite Valley.”

An investigation is ongoing, and the exact cause of death is not yet determined. On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the National Parks Service said investigators do not believe Hale was rock climbing at the time.

Before reaching Yosemite National Park, Hale had spent several months traveling to climb at places like Hueco Tanks State Park near El Paso, Texas, and Bishop, Ca., in the Eastern High Sierras. Friedlander said Hale was apparently writing a book chronicling his travels.

Before he threw himself fully into rock climbing, Hale enjoyed acting, said family friend Chris Meyers, a Gainesville resident. Meyers said his wife taught Hale in the theater program at Eastside High. Hale also used to perform at the Hoggetowne Medieval Fair as a member of the Thieves Guilde acting troupe.

After graduating Eastside in 2004, Hale studied theater at Santa Fe Community College for a year.

His friends remember him as a subdued and quiet, yet very well liked.

“He was extremely popular,” Meyers said. “He had a huge extended network of friends.”

Contact Christopher Curry at 374-5088 or chris.curry@gvillesun.com”

Time to Return

To say that I have done very little exercise in the past 4 months would be a gross understatement; I have done close to no exercise… I was focusing hard on finishing my PhD, working every waking hour, and it still isn’t done.  It still isn’t done but I’m back to climbing and working out because some things are even more important than that 7 year journey that the PhD has been.  Together with the physical inactivity has been a spiritual inactivity; the hours spent behind the computer are nothing less than soul-numbing.  The sitting position does not lend itself to good breath or good circulation… I’m surprised I didn’t get bed sores on my ass.

Last night I returned from an awesome 6 day trip which inaugurated the return to physical and spiritual aliveness.  This trip started with a journey from Oakland to Flagstaff for the wedding of two good friends, Matt and Corrie.

The wedding was at the Snowbowl and, despite the strong winds, it turned out to be a beautiful wedding.

The day before the wedding we went climbing at a nearby spot called The Pit.  This is a nice crag with cool features such as tufas and deep pockets; we went up some easy routes and enjoyed the scenery.  On the way out I was informed that Priest Draw was only a few minutes away!!  Super psyched I spread the word and the next morning we returned for bouldering.

We were impressed by the area, particularly by how vast it was!  Seemed like there were more and more rock outcroppings and awesome roofs the further back we looked.  Not having much time, we decided to climb on some of the first rocks we saw.  The climbing here takes some adapting; it is mainly roof climbing on deep two finger pockets with powerful dynamic moves.  I am just getting back into climbing after a 4 month hiatus so my power was very low and my skin felt soft and sensitive; however, I played on an excellent V8 (V7 if you know the key beta) called Wife Beater (shown below).

Mike Palmer slapping Wife Beater

Me trying hard on Wife Beater.

That night was the wedding and Max Z. in time to perform his best man duties; he arrived fresh from the Bouldering World Cup in Vail, Colorado, and was pscyhed to go to Priest Draw the next morning.  At 9am we were walking around the boulder field; the temperature was perfect and the sky was sunny and clear.  We hiked about a bit, warmed up on a super easy juggy wall, and just as we were about to explore the boulder field we saw a super cool boulder and our goal of seeing many different boulders suddenly imploded… beside this one roof boulder we found an awesome piece of rock which housed the classic line The Egyptian.

The Egyptian is rated V11 and was first climbed by the one-and-only Chris Sharma in the movie Rampage; most climbers are familiar with the scene in which Chris hangs from a double gaston on roof pockets and then swings his feet to the lip and scrambles up the rock, leaving the onlookers amazed.  We warmed on up easier lines to the right of The Egyptian and then filmed and shot photos of Max attempting and sending the classic line.

Below is a video of Mike P. sending a line to the right of The Egyptian.

Here is a sequence of a failed attempt at the crux move of The Egyptian:

And here is the video of the send:

After the short visit to Priest Draw I headed West with the family.   We went across Death Valley and to the bouldering meca that is Bishop; I was expecting to find scorching heat but still thought it would be a good place to visit, to show Ursula and Kale’a, and to camp.  We found unseasonally cool temperatures and plenty of rain but enough gaps to enjoy the rocks and to hike.

Enjoying the view:

Some morning yoga:

A morning hike on Iron Man:

After Bishop we headed up to Tuolumne Meadows, the Yosemite high country.  Our plan was to camp there and then drive to Oakland the next day but the campgrounds were closed… very very sad.

It is impossible to express how stunningly beautiful Tuolumne was… the air was pristine, snow blanketed much of the mountains and some of the meadows, the clouds rolled above us and there was plenty of wildlife.  We spent the whole time ‘ooohing’ and ‘aaahing’, stopping the car and making plans to live up here indefinitely.

We arrived safely at home and desirous to climb, camp, hike and just have a deeper involvement with nature… visiting it more often.  And personally, this marks the end of my 4 month leave from climbing; the membership at the climbing gym was unfrozen and today I started the return to fitness.

So stay tuned, more trip reports will be happening soon!

Spreading the word

on this video:

http://vimeo.com/4675262

I really enjoyed this.

Reminiscing

Man… since I started 9 years ago I have never gone this long without climbing!  A month and a half of being in front of the computer working on finishing the dissertation…

The desktop background on my Apple 17″ screen is a picture I took while on the second pitch of some rad climb in Yosemite 3 (?) years ago.  Gorgeous granite… pathcy white clouds against the blue sky, the canopy of trees extending through the valley and crawling onto the slopes…  arghh….

I cannot wait to go climbing again……….

I’m posting here a video from a Yosemite trip I took in Movember (notice the moustache).  We chanced upon Midnight Lightning with a bunch of pads so I was all psyched to get on it.  This is as far as I got on it.  I only got 20 or so minutes on this climb before the crowd and the pads dispersed and the fall became too intimidating for my small and not-so-cushiony pad.

Sigh, can’t wait, can’t wait.

The Core

Sonnie Trotter has a nice blog and has often written about topics which I find to be important.  If not important they are at least engaging and humorous.

Recently he wrote about The Core, as in that infamous belt which all humans have to protect their spine but which is seriously overlooked in our workouts.  I highly recommend jumping on the bandwagon, reading the post and following the discussion.

http://sonnietrotter.com/roadlife/

Kung Fu Climbing

This past month, yes the full month, I didn’t climb.  I went on a visit to Florida, to work more intensely, on my phd dissertation and decided to take the whole month off.  This decision was backed up by two main reasons: 1) the gym in Gainesville doesn’t get me psyched anymore and 2) a part of me felt it was time to try something else, another sport or something.
It is clear that I love climbing.  I obsess about it, I dream about it, I buy the movies and remember the climbs I did ages ago.  And it gets a little tiring, especially since I haven’t been able to do that much climbing!!!  To put it succintly I’ll quote a good friend who shares my name and some of my tendencies but doesn’t show his face as often: “Too much porn and not enough f#@%ing”.
So I decided to take up Kung Fu.

I have a few friends who have been doing Kung Fu regularly and obsessively for several years now and whenever I hear of their training routines I am pretty impressed.  One day I decided to try their “Day Zero”, just for kicks, and was thoroughly impressed by the physical and mental demands on the body in conjunction with the fluid, zen, approach.  It really fit with me.  The last exercise of Day Zero was to hold a stick behind your back, such that the hands were in fists facing forwards and the stick was supported by the inside of the elbows, and to rotate the torso such that the stick would strike a punching bag.  And to do that 1000 times.
1000 times!

So I joined the Dojo and for about 20 days, at lunch time, I would go there and be put through different routines.  What sticks out the most were the punches and kicks.  I had to complete about 8 different punches and 8 different kicks.  Each punch and each kick had to be done 150 times on each side into the air and then 150 times on each side onto a punching bag.  So, that’s 8 x 300 x 2 = 4800 kicks and 4800 punches.  The sheer volume is dizzying.  This aside from the core conditioning ab exercises and pushups and so on.

That month has passed and I’m now back in the East Bay.  It is raining outside so no climbing at Mortar Rock today but I’m psyched for going to the gym and my brain has been running on overload as to new training methods and exercises for climbing!!

Blast from Joshua Past

One of my favorite climbing photos.

Shot by a guy from Belgium who I happened to meet at Joshua Tree.  The climb is called Stemgem.

Arghh The Pain

This is just a short post to say that the Hueco 2008/2009 trip has been called of for me… gotta focus on writing my phd thesis!

It was a super hard decision to make, but now it is done so it is time to focus on the indoor training and on the thesis.

Chatt

I was super psyched on going outdoors in the deep south while visiting Florida for 10 days, and with plenty of longs days/nights sitting in front of the computer running astronomy programs and editing the thesis, I managed time to climb.

Friday morning two friends and I left for the 7 hour car drive from Gainesville Florida to Chattanooga Tennessee.

Being a climbing fanatic I’m well read on the climbing blogs out there and well aware that Chattanooga is not talked about that much.  It is generally Bishop, Castle Rock, Yosemite, Gunks, South Africa, Switzerland… and so on.  Not so much the deep south.  But hey, if Wills Young and Lisa Rands have decided to make Chattanooga their home (after living in Bishop) then some good climbing can’t be far away.  Truth is that the Deep South has pristine boulders, awesome features, awesome rock, loads of potential, and a chill atmosphere to accompany it all.

It is all a matter of preference.  Sure you don’t have millions of boulders as you may find in South Africa but you have cool streams and golden-yellow/radiant-red blankets of leaves.  You don’t have lions or rattlesnakes or scorpions or tarantulas… you have chill walking around with North Face sweaters on.  Your pick.

What I like most about trips in the south is messing around on hard climbs with good friends.  With temps between 25 and 50 Farenheit (hummm… what? 15 degrees celsius or something) on our first day we went to Rocktown in Georgia with the aim of working on classic lines such as The Orb, and The Vagina… (you only find such names in the south).  Despite feeling much stronger than a year ago, and having trained plenty indoors, I couldn’t piece anything together outdoors.  I felt all disjointed.  Like a wave of energy being channeled into a ragged doll – unable to stay clear and simple and focused on… and I somewhat expected this.

I have learned that only after 3 or 4 days of continuous climbing outdoors do I settle in.  Something happens, somatically.  Some shift.  Short trips are always filled with the need to send, now, make the move right, do it on this try…   The trip to Hueco Tanks last New Years was a great revelation, 10 days of climbing with 1 rest day, and I was noticing how my body settled more and more into climbing.

So I focused on having fun, which is what I do best, and with that mentality still managed to pull-off the FA of the bong by being the first (and only one) in sticking the first two moves on Digital Scales!  And thoroughly enjoyed watching a friend crush, flashing, nearly all the climbs we got on – Florida gym rats.

There are some rad classics I hope to come back to on a longer trip.  The Orb for sure.

The second day turned out to be just as good as the first, not without some challenges though as many of the members of our group had either gotten physically injured or metally injured (when the soreness of the body starts telling you to not climb on an amazing perfect weather day).  Some left and others headed out to enjoy the rock at Laurel Snow (aka Dayton Pocket(s)).  Top of the agenda was River Dance, a V9 I had done in a day last year, shortly after its first ascent by Jimmy Webb, and that had gained reputation as one of the raddest climbs in the Southeast.

The group converged there and we had a short warm up on two-move V0s before RD called to us.  I was interested in the low start (V11/12) but looking at the holds and my performance yesterday I was realistic and decided to play on the original line.  I tried it a couple of times and failed in nearly all the moves individually; my finger was bleeding and I was content to take video and shout insultingly-comical remarks at the friends trying the route.  Unexpectedly my ego was to get a boost as first some strong Vdouble-digit friends showed up followed by a high-profile climber and they all set their eyes on sending this classic.  I thought for sure there would be flashes but in fact no flashes and only one send.  So a part of me was all happy for having done this line last year (even though I couldn’t move on it this day) which uber-strong climbers couldn’t do.

Soo, two days of an awesome climbing trip with great friends pulling down on bullet-proof rock nestled in a pristine low-key location.  Videos to come shortly.

Photos and Video

Had to start with a picture of Midnight Lightning.  I only got those 30 minutes of pads on the first day and didn’t stick the crimp Lightning bolt hold so….. I’ll have to go back for that!  I did do several other beautiful climbs, amongst which was King Cobra, V8:

Didn’t get video of my ascent but here are two videos of King Cobra.  The second video has Mark making it look too easy so I add a video of Owen having a harder time with it.  My ascent looked like something in between the two in the video

Kaleakai soloing a slab:

Very cool move on Tendons Give

Owen on Blue Suede Shoes

The family:

More Midnight Lightning

The Falls and the girls:

Yosemite and Maggie: