1973 Webster - it's Hammer Time!

As a child Ed Webster read “Everest Diary”, an account of the first Americans to climb Everest.  This book left an indelible mark on Webster’s memory, one that has inspired Ed his entire life (I shudder to think what kids influenced by Justin Bieber will be inspired to achieve…).  Even though a 1988 ascent of Everest cost him eight fingertips, the excitement of the mountains still resonates through his bones.  Yet before climbing Everest numerous times, Webster traveled the United States… climbing… well everywhere.

First Ascent of Super Crack 1976 (Indian Creek) - Now that's a crack!

Barely into his teens, Webster ditched high school classes to climb with up and comer “Hot” Henry Barber, eventually moving out west to attend Colorado College during the early ’70s to climb with Colorado luminaries like Jim Erickson, Art Higbee and Pat Ament… to name a few.  He went on to establish many classic routes such as The Scenic Cruise in the Black Canyon and Super Crack in Indian Creek.

Spending nearly all his life creating and collecting adventures to tell, it’s no wonder Webster is a skilled storyteller.  In the clip below, Webster describes his first meeting with pioneer rock climber Fritz Wiessner.  Born in 1900 Germany (now that’s old school!), Wiessner emigrated to the United States and established the most difficult routes in places such as the Gunks in the ’30s and ’40s.

Currently Ed resides in Maine as an author and lecturer.  His most recent book Snow in the Kingdom is currently sold out but Ed told us that a new print should be out in a couple of months.  He’s also planning an upcoming lecture tour, so if you would like more information about having Ed speak, email him at edwebster@mtnimagery.com!

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…

When we arrived in New Paltz, things changed.

Everywhere were beautiful colors of red and yellow that you don’t see in California.

This was the Gunks.

Our first interviews with Ajax Greene and Rich “Bukowski” Goldstone were so inspiring that we floated out (at around 10 or 11pm, some hours after we had said we would be done).

We floated around the Mohonk, unperterbed that we couldn’t find ‘Camp Slime’, and eventually floated down our sleeping bags on the hard gravel of the Mohonk Parking Lot.

It was balmy (compared to Colorado), perfect for sitting against a tire well drinking beer, writing, reading, looking at the sky.

We floated on through the morning to Oasis Coffee Shop, where we would stop every morning to wash up once we found Camp Slime (as the ‘camp’ has no water and only one portapotty).

In the shop, we floated into the gregarious Bob D’Antonio (who we’d just had a prolific interview with in CO days earlier).

Together we floated down the street to Rock&Snow, agreeing to climb together and chatting with store owner Rich Gottlieb.

Then we floated by Henry Barber as he pulled up with Russ Clune and talked about our plans to meet him in New Hampshire.

It was magical, this many different people from Gunks history walking around and us wrapped up in it like just so many red and yellow leaves in the wind.

We agreed to meet at the Cliffs, and floated into our car, floated out of the driveway, and then floated…into oncoming traffic.

CRASH!

To say I was unaffected would be a lie.  Do I even have insurance in a rental car?  How much is this going to cost?  When is our next interview for the day?

“Does this mean we’re not going climbing anymore?”

Just when things had begun to loosen up, a moments miscalculation had ruined my perfect driving record and threatened (along with the fat lady frantically wheezing about her defaced Subaru) my insurance rates.

Once the small town cops had decided we were young California reckless-driving stereotypes they went on their way.  Max, in a nice gentle way, asked me if I was ok, and if I wanted a beer or cup of coffee.  As we stood back inside of Oasis getting some more Joe, The Five Stair Steps was playing overhead…

Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child, things’ll be brighter
Some day, yeah
We’ll put it together and we’ll get it all done

Well, I’m not citing any kind of cosmic Playlist, but I’m sure I’ll remember the feeling of drinking coffee over interview notes on the bumpy polyester arm chairs at Oasis on a crisp New York autumn day whenever I hear this song again.

07-motown-stylistics-oooh-child-things-are-gonna-get-easier

Crawling out of the VW after leaving the clutches of the thriving desert for the screeching tires/concrete amalgamations of LA, I try to explain how the Joshua Tree trip went to my LA base, but I keep trailing off while my eyes glaze over…I’m replaying the footage we shot 24 hours earlier in my head.

I think I have my hands on something good. It’s part of an answer that I’ve been looking into for some time. No, sadly, not the answer to the Meaning of Life (this was a peyote-free trip) but rather, part of the answer to the question: how to best film a climb.

Five days earlier I picked up the Davis boys (Max and Sam) from the Ontario airport and jetted off (ok, crawled up laboriously in 2nd gear) to Jtree with the purpose of climbing and filming a climb which would be used in conjunction with the excerpt interview I had just gotten from Lars Holbek two days before (he was here on a brief CA stint relocating endangered tortoises in 29 Palms so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.)

After two days of climbing and location scouting for a good route (one which, for example, didn’t include a remote 5.9 crack in Oz where the approach was a 5.10a lieback and the crux was an angry swarm of bees…) we settled on a nice line in split rocks which would suit all the requirements of filming.

Luckily, Max eats 5.7 cracks like this one for breakfast and was graciously (almost mischievously) willing to do the climb a gazillion times up AND down, basically free soloing the thing repeatedly to get the shots. (Max was using gear from the 70s with worn or even melted perlon, wearing a swami belt while Sam belayed him using a loose hip belay at best…) But he’s got the grace of a young Henry Barber and biceps the size of small children, and as such, made it all look really great.

We experimented with lots of different ways to film the crack (helmet cam, jib arm, me on top rope dangling nearby…)

Though initially not jazzed on the helmet cam idea (seemed too gimmicky in my mind, and did nothing to solve the need to go ‘beyond documentation’) now I’ve had a 360 turn around. The footage, unnaturally jerky and fast moving, gives an animated life to the climb which I hadn’t anticipated.

It can’t replace necessary shots, like those from the camera on belay, but it gave me something much more unusual than I had expected. As for filming from a hanging belay, I think to throw in some etriers and get more practice with the jumars (you know, so people don’t have to literally haul on the other end of the tope rope to get my ass started on the rock) oughta solidify that setup.

The most successful setup that we used was definitely in conjunction with the jib arm.

There is something mysteriously poetic about the movement of the camera up along the vertical crack, in conjunction with, but not simultaneous to, Max’s jamming movement upwards. The two movements are at once quite different, a flowing, endless vertical crack mixed with episodic rhythms of hands and feet jamming one by one horizontally; with a moving crane as simple as the jib arm, the intersection of the two is visualized, and the whole magic of the climb is expressed with one sweeping shot that takes less than maybe 5 seconds.

Perhaps now I am heading into eye glaze territory, but I do believe that I’ve stumbled onto a key element to dramatizing a climb.

Now, how to get this setup in a place where theres not a wide ledge at the bottom of the climb? Perhaps we can lure the guys from Piton Productions with their helicams to entertain an experimental collaboration…

As has been shown from countless amateur (or less than amateur…) climbing videos which go no further than simple documentation…watching someone do a climb is either boring or untrue to the nature of the climb (ie filming a slab climb from the bottom looks wimpy, versus heel hooks on extreme overhangs become the desensitized norm). And watching a climber doing a really hard climb, filmed without strategy, is just climbing porn. After a few shots of one crux after the other, we’re desensitized, bored. It means nothing, has no effect on the viewer.

Basically, the entire art of filmmaking rests in the craft of faking real experiences. “Jaws” isn’t the movie that made us all afraid to go in swimming pools because we saw an animatronic shark zooming through the water. No, it made us afraid because of the way the camera bobbed up and down at sealevel for those shots when we know the shark is about to pounce…that’s our eye level, our perception, what we feel every time we are waiting around for a wave…when we start to play the epic theme song in our heads…and thats how Jaws gets us. (Wow, can’t believe I’m using Spielberg references…i must be going mainstream, might as well enroll at USC…) Enough of this film school mumbo gumbo. The end.

So all that was one major point of the weekend: to find out how to convey the drama of a climb, the tension, the grace, the psychological mapping, the experience…