Tahoe Classics vid

Before I peace out I had to share this teaser from Alton Richardson. This is another video to keep your eye out for.

On the Road Again

I leave tomorrow for the road after being a working man for a while. I'm psyched to be back to full time rock climbing. I spent my last 10 days here really busy trying to get the last bit of bouldering in here at home. Between that, packing and planning it's not yet started to feel like vacation. I'm headed through the country in my truck and stopping along the way to see old friends. My first stop is the southeast. I'm psyched to do some bouldering at Horse Pens 40. It is the place where I learned to boulder when I was 18. I just remember being a gumby beginner and going there in the dead of summer to flail on slopers at 95 degrees. Even now I think its cool because back then I could care less about getting good temps. I couldn't stop myself from going on a 12 hour round trip in the car to pull off the ground on some of the coolest sandstone ever. It will be neat to go there again after many years and see if I've acquired any new skills from my time here in California. We'll see.
I also hope to check out Dayton since I love long roof climbing. That one looks really cool. All the boulders in the Chattanooga area look really awesome as well. I plan to be there from November through January. From there Arkansas and then Hueco Tanks for a while. Hueco is another area that I've been ready to revisit. I spent time there during 4 seasons in a row but haven't been back for about 6 years now. Hopefully it will feel as fun as it used to parking outside the gate for 6 hours because I'm too lazy to get reservations. From there...well I figure I'll see where the trip takes me. I definately have South Africa in mind for next summer. Time will tell.
I'll spend the last day packing, organizing and saying good bye to my peeps. I want to recaps some things that went down but I don't have time to type it all gracefully. So the short version CLIF notes of what went down in the past two weeks is as follows:
No more work. Photos. Video. Phone calls. Texts. Seishuku Samarai v10 ! yee haw. Sushi after climbing. Return of Frank Lucido. Packing. Cleaning. More photos. Mountain Beaver 4 day backpack trip. Awesome dinners. First ascents. New Boulders. More First Ascents. Motta Tiempo v6 (half lowball, half scary). Hiking pads. Hiking more pads. Dry firing off the top of river project. Sweaty tips. Packing. D Sky. More photos. More packing. Procrastinating. Road trip jitters. Packing. Emailing. Blogging....

A new project goes down

The crew and I have been doing a lot of work here in Tahoe. The new boulders being found are producing many must do classics. You have to be willing to hike far and steep to get to them but they are very worthy. Most of the problems have been working out to be v5. All of them are turning out to be really quality.
This weekend was a last hurahh for me as I start a new job this week. I went to the upper area at the Mountain Beavers to try my hand at my latest long term epic. The problem sit starts under a steep prow. There are no easy moves on it. Right away you launch into powerfull compression climbing. You just keep slapping fat glassy slopers with the right, while opposing on small crimpy sidepulls with the left. After negociating the steep prow you get to a top out crux that forces you to move right over a peculiar landing. The finishing moves are powerfull and insecure and lead to a technical top out. I spent 9 days figuring this beast out. On day 9 I managed to finally scream my way up this new climb. I called it Dark Passenger. This new climb was quickly repeated by Eric Sanchez. It was impressive to watch Eric make this problem look very easy. It took him about an hour total to send. Eric and I had a discussion on the possible grade of this thing. As usual, there is no right answer to this question, only a best guess. We decided that this thing is probably v11/12, so we went with v11. Either way, it is a very worthy endeaver and is possibly the hardest line at the area so far.
The next day I headed to the middle zone to try Jarrad Wycoff's mega line Integrity Low. I thought that I'd never see the day when I could do a problem that was as reachy as this one. It was one of those dry windy days though and shit worked out. I managed to do this thing, which I believe is the 4th ascent. I am a big fan of compression climbing. This climb is one of the best in its style that I've ever done. It is beautiful, proud, and very hard. For me, this problem was probably solid v11/12, but I am short and am at a major disadvantage on the giant spans, so I feel v10 is a good rounded out grade for this climb. That being said, it is one of the best boulder problems in South Lake Tahoe. After that I went down to the river roof and finished the left side project next to Primitive Fire. We named it Refried Rasberry v8. A very cool roof that I recommend trying when it's colder.
On the video front, I've been working with Brad Perry to help get the new Mountain Beavers movie out. We've been going out getting lots of footage of the classic there. The video will basically be an entertaining take on the full experience of developing this new area. The filming pretty much started at day one back in early May and has continued through the booming of this new zone. Brad has been doing a great job on the editing of this video. I've included his teaser of the video so you can check it out.