We put together a short video of with some of our interviewees from our ongoing project The Last Wild Mountain - here talking about the American Alpine Club, a wonderful organization preserving climbing heritage for over 100 years. They have helped us in many ways and here’s a little bit of appreciation back.
Check out how they are helping the climbing community at their website or Facebook Fan Page.
Our first interview of the official production our first day in Golden, Colorado was with none other than the philosophical gentleman, John Gill. No practice starts or easing into these things, just one hell of a running start with this man:
A complex character, John Gill is tagged as the “Father of Modern Bouldering” — someone who developed what’s now termed “bouldering” almost single handedly starting in the 1950s when the concept of rock climbing, let alone bouldering, was just barely accepted as a pursuit worthy in its own right.
Bouldering: A style of rock climbing which is focused on a short series of very difficult moves (known as a problem) without a rope and normally limited to very short climbs so that a fall will not result in serious injury.
Here are some tidbits. Rich Goldstone and Bob D’Antonio on Gill (and I apologize for the lo quality of youtube):
Suffice to say, Gill has been an enigma to many throughout the years, and his philosophies and practices are only just being examined in relation to their overaching significance in the changing roles of climbing. Many were influenced and many large trends started, and Gill can be linked to much of the inital concepts for a metaphysical outlook on the kinesthetic act of climbing. Mr. Gill himself:
It’s no small thing to say that this interview was given about two hours before John recieved the Underhill Award from the American Alpine Club — an award for a lifetime achievement in climbing. That this award was given to a boulderer was no small gesture; in fact, as both Gill and Jim McCarthy say in their interviews, it was the AAC under the presidency of McCarthy himself that first recognized bouldering as a legitimate pursuit in 1969. That we were able to be here for this moment and to get Gill’s indelible remarks, was also no small priviledge.
night bouldering at the shawangunks in honor of Mr. Gill
Some bits of the scenery from the trip:
I’ve always thought car window landscapes to be very poetic. But to be frank, it’s a good thing for the “poetry” of the clips above that you can’t smell this video. After 15 days of living out of a suitcase on a tattered shoe-string budget with two boys, the sweaty, dirty, rough and tumble battle of wits/nerves/dollars/cents/sleep and shower deprivation permeated inside these windows would be enough to wipe out a colony of fruit flies (which worked out well to keep the population springing up from the leftover fruit rinds and coffee cups in the car to a minimum).
We were met in Golden, Colorado with freezing, slushy snow-capped aspens and mountainsides, having pulled out of a sweltering 90 degree southern California garage some 14 hours earlier. Having pulled an all nighter the night before, then driven 14 hours straight from 7pm till the early morning, I arrived in CO sufficiently hopped up on Frappucinos and anticipation. This would be the running theme for the entire trip.
We came one day early to see the rare surfacing of Layton Kor giving a slideshow. Naturally, we went to not only the wrong theater, but the wrong city altogether, realizing just minutes before the show was to begin. We jumped in our overburdened Ford Escort station wagon with luggage rack and screamed down a tiny interstate to the nearby city of Boulder where the slideshow had been relocated. I thought it was fitting, as we zoomed around turns, pedal to the metal, that we should be on our way to see a man speak who developed a reputation driving hair-raising hair-pin turns on his way to the Black Canyon in the 60s.
If our arrival in New York had pegged us as ‘hippies’ (as I’ll explain in later entries), then our arrival in Colorado landed us the role of “City Slickers.” The state of Colorado has suppposedly more outdoor enthusiasts per capita than any other state, and your average Coloradoan can be found mentioning climbing, snowboarding, hiking, and scuba diving all in the same conversation.
complete sets of outdoor gear inside the Music Tent at the Craggin Classic
With my Skinny jeans, my Blackberry, and my lack of an alpine light North Face backpack, I fell immediately into a Southern Californian stereotype (as did Jason for numerous reasons similar to mine and Max for his flip flops). Not to mention that we were in town not to climb, but to film interviews in a dark room all day long where we were recreating a “campfire look” Hollywood style in the basement of the American Mountaineering Center’s extensive Library with 2k of lights and a Magic Gadget Flicker Box that baffled pretty much all of our interviewees (baffled or blinded, either one).
Despite our telltale Californianism, it’s an anything goes scene, and we were welcomed in to the free-beer-music-rain-frenzy just as warmly as the next guy. You have to hand it to the AAC for putting together such a cross sectioned event — this was the first annual Craggin Classic, and I hope it will be the first of many (and maybe next year I can go back without having interviews and just purely have some fun!) The people around ranged from funloving outdoorsman to international up and comers to climbing superstars and legendary climbing icons. Our interviews reflected this smorgasbord, with interviews ranging from Jim Donini and John Gill to Alison Osius and Bob D’Antonio then Matt Samet, to Majka Burhard, Rob Pizem, and Katie Brown. The only important things on this trip were these interviews, and I’m happy to say that they were amazing. I’ll be posting bits of them very soon.
Everyday would also follow the Craggin pattern: Interviews all day, then 5pm Happy Hour started with unlimited beer and wine, followed by unlimited food, and free live music. For young budget filmmaker/climbers on a road trip, FREE is pretty much a mandate for binge overconsumption, and thus, though sleep deprived as we were, I don’t think there was a single day of the Craggin that I didn’t wake up with a hangover.
me, Corene, and Danielle making the most of the unlimited booze
We had a brief few hours our last day involving both rain-free weather and no interviews, so we drove out to Eldorado Canyon to hit up a classic route or two not far from the road (ok, right off the road).
We did this (Northcutt’s Direct - great FA story of Ray Northcutt being sandbagged into the first 5.10+ in the country) and the crack on the right that’s an old school Classic 5.7 “Bastille Crack” - also in my mind from the earlier Kor reading; leave it to Pat Ament to paint a portrait strong enough to imbue a seemingly normal 5.7 by the roadside with a magical sense of history…
No backwards falls this time.
After our last interview in Coloroado with Bob Culp at his store in Boulder, we grabbed some food and beer and headed back to Keystone where we’d been bunkering down with Corene, the hostess with mostest in her granola bar supplying, shuttle drivin ski resort apartment. We got in about 11pm, with packing for the flight to New York in the forefront of our minds as we had to leave for the Denver Airport at 4:30am, only a few hours away. But when we arrived, it became immediately clear that our hostess, having consumed her weight in smirnoff screwdrivers, had no intention of letting us inside…unless we promised to get in the hottub with her and the rest of the ski bum crew! After multiple attempts at pleas and phone calls, and even a successful attempt by Max at scaling to her balcony, we had no choice but to acquiesce.
After the interlude in the hottub, I headed downstairs to begin packing, weighing (with Corene’s scale), and repacking our 6 suitcases with film gear to make sure each was under 50lbs. My wet hair froze stiff. 3:30am rolled by, still packing. 4:00am, getting close.
The clock struck 4:25 in the morning, and I realized that I had no space or time left to pack any of my own clothes, so…
3 undershirts, 3 t-shirts, 1 polo short, 1 sweater, 1 sweatshirt, 1 peacoat, 1 pair of longjohns, 2 pair of pants, and a hat later, I waddled through Denver International Airport Security, and we were on our way to New York City!
4 all nighters, 1 car crash, 21 interviews, many MANY cups of terrible gas-station coffee, 6 suitcases (1 destroyed), 1 million dead braincells, 1 leader fall, 6 flights, 15 days, and 5,000 miles later and the journey has, ceremoniously, begun. It was not an easy feat, and we had the smells to prove it. (Insert feat/feet pun at your leisure.)
Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, with the car crash, the Gunks, and the various interview clips soon to be released!
It’s official. We’re headed out across the country! We have some crucial interviews coming up that we absolutely can’t get any other time. How are we going to pull this off without having our production money for another 3 months???
Help us grease the wheels (you’ll get some goodies):
For more info on what that is, why, and what do you get, check out the Chipin Page: http://rockadventureguide.chipin.com/send-us-to-new-york
Beep. Slap. Cellphones just don’t have the same kind of dramatic hanging-up qualities like those old school phones from the 80s, I thought. But that’s for another day, and right now I was happy, celebratory, running around the house in my pajamas. I’d just gotten off the phone with Dana, a volunteer coordinator from the American Alpine Club who is trying to help me setup interviews with rock climbers in Colorado.
The greatest thing about this project so far (though we’re in the early stages, so, no gloating) is the great responses I’ve been getting from people in the climbing community. It’s genuinely inspiring.
When you hang out in LA and mention you want to make a film, expect your waiter to chime in ‘you, me, and everybody else in this over-priced hamburger joint, babe’. I wouldn’t really begrudge the comment because its true! (LA is crawling with filmmakers who want desperately to make crappy movies for lots of money.) But when you are making a film that means something to a whole community, well, it becomes more than just a personal fancy, but a group effort. And that feels pretty cool.
Alex, the crew member responsible for the hand drawings on the website, suggested that I put up bios of the climbers who will be interviewed in the doc. So here is a start:
Lars and a stray dog, circa 1973.Lars has climbed, camped, kayaked and hiked across the continent, through North, Central, and South America.
He has lots of First Ascents from the [then] unpopulated Red Rocks of Nevada, including a sweet committing and traditional line known as Ginger Cracks.
Shortly after the trip in the Red Rocks where Lars completed this First Ascent with Mark Moore, the two were riding a freight train when, as luck would have it, they were spotted by a railway official. The official, however, only caught Mark, forcing him to get off with his two dogs, and leaving Lars behind. After they were split up, it would be months before the two friends would see each other again and find out what happened. (The details form one of my favorite stories, so I’m savin ‘em for the movie.)
Lars is also an epic figure in the whitewater kayaking and rafting scene, having done over 30-50 first descents in the USA. Remember the Tony the Tiger commercial with the Tony paddling down a river? Yup, that was Lars.
He currently has a converted vegetable oil bus, and is building a green sustainable home/barn/paradise on some land in Colorado. The last time I saw him a few years ago, he was sleeping in a mattress propped up in a tree on that land.
The man has stories to make you laugh, gasp, and get goose bumps.
