On our interview trip in June, we were lucky to stop in on climbing icon John Bachar in Mammoth Lakes.  He gave us beer, let us interview him for about 3 hours, and filled our heads with hair-raising stories of free-solo epics and excruciatingly high standards of climbing style.

A little over a week ago, John Bachar was found dead near Dike Wall, having fallen while free-soloing by himself.

Needless to say, John Bachar plays a large role in our story.  His loss is sad news to the project, although we are very grateful we were able to capture his life reflections and stories while we had the chance.

Here are a few brief clips we edited from his interview that give a tiny inkling of his life and climbs:

We appreciate Peter Croft’s sentiment about the Buhl line which seems appropriate for John:

“Instead of falling to my death, I fell into life itself.”

There is an interesting outsider-perspective obituary in the New York Times you should read if you’d like to know more about the man (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/sports/09bachar.html) with a few errors, as well as a Supertopo thread with memories and pictures (http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=896012).

Setting up inside John Bachar’s Mammoth Lakes house.

R.I.P. John.

After 30 interviews in roughly 30 days, we are back from a coast-to-coast trip in the VW. So much to show and tell, but it will have to wait. We hit the Jackpot. Although with no help from these guys:

New Jersey, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, California. We won about $6 so far.

It’s a new year, a new day, a new president, a new moon.

I went out to Joshua Tree National Park for the first time since Fall; it had finally warmed up - in fact it was so balmy and warm it felt like an Indian Summer.  My friend/line producer Nick and I walked back to our campsite in the dark with our ropes and gear strung about us after a full day of climbing.  The moon was out and it was full and milky white, beaming down on us.  Everything else was a beautiful blue.  We were tired but happy and full of peace.  We just walked in silence, looking at our moonshadows, not saying a word.  A coyote trotted past us heading the opposite way.  A falling star shot through the sky.

It really is a new year, and it’s going to be a great year.

2008

2008 had been an eventful year for the Rock Adventure.  We’d gone to Salt Lake City for Outdoor Retailer, gone to the Climber’s Museum opening in Yosemite, been in Colorado for the Craggin Classic, made a million phone calls and a million emails, been to New York for the ‘Gunks Reunion; crashed a car, slept on the ground, slept in the van, not slept at all, partied with International climbers, met a ton of new people, been to Yosemite for the 50th Year Reunion of the First Ascent of the Nose; lost some crew, gained some crew; interviewed, in order: John Gill, Majka Burhard, Matt Samet, Alison Osius, Bob D’Antonio, Jim Donini, Katie Brown, Rob Pizem, Bob Culp, Rich Goldstone, Ajax Greene, Burt Angrist, Jim McCarthy, Dick Williams, Elaine Matthews, Al DeMaria, and Rich Romano.  This was just the beginning.

2009

We have a new mac book pro.  We have fresh faces on crew.  We’re on twitter.  We have a garageful of our favorite Duraflame logs for the storytelling sessions by the campfire.  We will be interviewing: Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, Henry Barber, John Bragg, Joe Herbst, Ed Webster, Paul Piana, John Long, Ron Kauk, Michael Kennedy, Doug Robinson, Scott Cosgrove, Sybille Hechtel, Don Lauria, Tom Higgins to name a few.   In a few months, we will be traveling to Yosemite, the Red Rocks, Colorado, Wyoming, New Hampshire to name some.  We want to meet you.  It’s a great beginning…

Having spent two months indoors on a diet of candy bars and beer working on the business aspects of this film, I decided it was time for a climbing vacation, and the choice was Tahquitz.

Next thing I know, it’s a little before ten pm, pitch dark. I find myself 700 feet up, in the grips of a mid-sized squeeze chimney (my er, ‘least favorite’ type of climb) with two more pitches before the summit. I’m sunburned everywhere except my kneepads, and everytime my skin touches rock, rivulets of pain shoot through me. To top it off, my headlamp’s broken swivel angles it 20 degrees away from my line of vision, I’m out of water, a mosquito flies into my ear, and I’m hauling a huge pack up from the abyss as I go. And I found myself asking the question that climbers have been asking themselves in a pickle since the dawn of time: What the hell am I doing here?

(Hoping to land in some medical book for symptoms of pedalicus chimney crackicera)

After getting to the top, a two-hour descent down a loose and unknow dark north gully, losing my sweatshirt, losing my mind, tired, thirsty, feet cramped in climbing shoes…

…I finally topped out back at ol Beasty at one thirty in the morning.

Beer, water, and sleep.

The next morning, my sweatshirt revealed! I know this picture looks fake, but honest this is exactly how I found it, hanging snagged perfectly middair between a branch and a boulder.

The point of the trip was to learn how to use my fathers medieval jumars (circa 1970)…

…with my brand new untouched etriers.

Despite the bruises, the ridiculous sunburn, the fatigue, the bleeding cuticles, the uncertainty in the dark…or maybe in spite of them…graceless, yes, but it was a bonafide Tradventure.

I don’t see how hanging on the end of a rope to send a big numbers route sixty feet of the ground can compare to the experience of a real climbing adventure. Tahquitz oozes with the history of tough routes being done in big bulky shoes with questionable ropes and handmade gear by real adventurers. It’s great to climb.   To get stuck and lost.  And it’s great to just look up, read the FA in the back of the guidebook, and wonder.

I’ve noticed that people keep coming to me with all kinds of funny ideas and questions about this documentary. A variation of the two most common questions:

“Will you be climbing any big, um, rocks?”

“Have you seen the newUtube video of Chris Sharma free-soloing a 5.15d,e,f,g+++?”

It seems that our two most common audience members: people who know nothing about climbing, and people who know a truckload about fringe Extreme climbing. I am happy to answer these questions over and over again, because I know you’ll enjoy the movie whatever kind of would-be audience member you are. So to find out where you lie, here’s a pop quiz. What is this documentary about?

A) A retrospective look at the lives and livelihoods of the pioneers of climbing in North America;
B) Eco culture;
C) How tasty beer is under a starry sky;
D) Spandex;
E) The amazing geology on this continent;
F) The spirit of adventure
G) Subversion;
H) The dissemination of information within a community through word-of-mouth and print, and occasionally through supertopo.com;
I) Bolt Wars;
J) The necessity of wilderness to the human spirit;
K) How to cook off a propane stove for 365 days a year and not get diarrhea;
L) Everything I’ve ever wanted to see in a documentary! At last!
M) This all sounds cool if I knew what you were talking about…

If you answered L) then you are correct. You can go ahead and advance me the $14.95 for your copy of the DVD and I’ll see ya on opening night!

If, however, you answered M) then let me lure you in with a little more explanation.

The truth is that this documentary isn’t just about rock climbing and it’s not just about history. It’s about appreciating a specific type of individual, and a specific type of life. As Dudley Chelton put it:

“Before the 1960s, rock climbing had been widely considered the poorer cousin of mountaineering, an activity practiced aggressively only because America lacked the venues for proper alpinism. In the 1960s we find the roots of a rich rock climbing culture…for many key characters, climbing became a complete way of life…”

It’s a way of life that means dirtbagging it and living off fifty cents a day in order to maintain a life outside of a nine to five. It means hitchhiking and sleeping under the stars. It means scrambling through rocks and brush and spending days of exhausting labor to leave an artistic expression on the side of a cliff. It means hard work and risk in return for adventure and freedom. From John Long:

“Here, any rules were self-imposed. Everyone was free to invent himself as he saw fit, since no one was climbing for country or race or creed, but for themselves.”

From David Roberts, describing Ascent Magazine:

“If I had to paraphrase that vision, it would go something like this ‘Look, we know that climbing is the greatest thing in the world–maybe the only thing. But it’s dangerous too, not because you can get killed, but because it’s subversive, useless, wacko.”

As with any culture, rock climbing has been subject to many shifts and movements which change not only the technical and stylistic implications of the climbing life, but also the very philosophical reason for its existence. The documentary won’t be casting any formal judgment on the Bolt Wars, and while I don’t tote a Bosch, fair say will go to the philosophies behind sport climbing and the continuing shift of the sport. From Yvon Chouinard:

“We go through alternate generations. Right now the kids that are out doing sports are the children of the parents of the sixties. They don’t want to be dopers and run around hitchhiking and living on fifty cents a day. No, they’re Yuppies. They’re the cleanies. Climbing and that kind of sport doesn’t appeal to these kind of people. I’m happy to see that. I’m happy to see that climbing is going back. The only people getting into climbing are the geeks again.”

So that’s it, in brief, The Rock Adventure Guide is about a genuinely American counter-culture lifestyle…what it is, how it started, what it’s doing now, what future Adventures are in front of us…

Beasty is more than just a 1976 Volkswagen van. She is what we call our Home Operations Traveling Resource of Destiny (H.O.T.R.O.D.)

In other words, this is our mobile crew unit that we’ll be traveling in over 5,000 miles from California to New York and back. We will be driving, cooking, sleeping, drinking, reading, filming, logging, and capturing all from the van.

Volkswagens like ours have plenty of history with the outdoors, free spirits and climbing communities alike, so we think its pretty fitting. Like John ‘the Verm’ Sherman puts it in his naughty book “Sherman Exposed“:

V: The van’s paid for. People see me traveling around climbing all the time, not punching a time clock and they think I must have married a Rockefeller. Not true. Living in a van is dirt cheap and simple. No rent. No bills. No phone. No boss. One-third food, one-third gas, one-third beer. Every once in a while splurge for a dollar movie or a box of chalk. Like Eric Beck said, “at either end of the social spectrum lies a leisure class.”

So there you go. That’s more or less our philosophy. (BTW If you have any good VW stories or pictures, send them to me and I’ll put em up here).

Our course depends on where we will need to go to meet our interviewees, but as you can imagine, it seems like many of the climbers we want to talk to are located near big climbing epicenters. Which works out great for us, since we couldn’t do without footage of all these places for the film.

I based a loose estimate of where we’ll be headed based on Don Mellor’s neat book “American Rock, Region, and Culture” of which I’ll try to get a pic of soon so you can get an idea of where we’ll be heading ( so that…you could maybe suggest a pitstop!).

Despite the skepticism about the lack of a radiator, I feel pretty confident about Beasty. The engine has been rebuilt, and I’m currently working on getting a solar panel operating off the top to run/charge our film equipment. (If you have some particular knowledge on solar panels and controllers in VW buses, throw some advice our way! I’ve got the panel, but not the know-how).

And if problems arise, in AIRS we trust (Aircooled Interstate Rescue Squad). What other automobile can claim this kind of support!

This is our basic basic basic production plan, but right about now you may actually want to know what kind of film we are making or what its specifically going to cover…so that’s coming in the next post. In the meantime, our website has some basic over-edited info for you to peruse…

Thanks for readin!