On the 395, about eight miles outside of Bishop, sits an atomic yellow house and a shut-down gas station.   Ten years ago Roger Derryberry and Mary-Lou Long decided this would be the perfect spot for The Shrine to Buffoonery.

Inspired by reading about Warren Harding in the Fresno Bee, Derryberry went to Yosemite and sought Harding out.  Since that first meeting, they entered into a lifelong friendship.  Derryberry helped create many of the BAT (Basically Absurd Technology) inventions and was at the top of El Cap filming when Harding and Dean Caldwell topped out of The Wall of the Early Morning Light in 1970.  Next, they toured the US together.  After Warren’s death in 2002, Derryberry dedicated his time to creating something magnificent to commemorate the life of Harding.

From the outside, Mill Creek Station is unassuming… except for the phallic tribute (stone pillar and two boulders)  and devilish bust of Harding. 

Then you walk around back…

Derryberry has created an entire outdoor theater cut from the boulder laying adjacent to the house. Roger in fact hauled many of the boulders all on his own, literally tons.  Recently they put on a production of the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata.

The inside is a museum of Harding artifacts, including many handwritten letters of Harding.

The Shrine to Buffoonery is also presently active in showing films and staging concerts.  The Shrine serves as a venue for anything creative in the community.  Their doors are always open!

As a reminder, we have no marketing budget! Thus we rely purely on grassroot efforts to get the word out.  If you like what we are doing, please suggest our film to anyone you think would be interested.  Please join our Facebook Fanpage if you haven’t yet.  Or join our Mailing List for latest updates and release dates and showings! Thank you!

We are living in the most technologically advanced age in history.  At the present moment it’s difficult to imagine that the World Wide Web really didn’t even exist up until about 20 years ago.  Nobody born after 1990 will ever remember AOL and at the present moment I can video chat with someone in Finland…in real time… for free.  Needless to say, the world of rock climbing has not been insulated from technological advance.

Case in point:

We interviewed Jerry Gallwas about a year ago for our film.  Gallwas sent this telegram after he, Royal Robbins, and Mike Sherrick completed the first ascent of the Northwest Face of Half Dome in 1957.

Bossman- “Hey Jerry you’re late for work, what’s the deal!?!?”

Jerry - “Oh yeah about that… excuse me for being late but I just climbed the FACE OF HALF DOME.”

I’d imagine that if this happened today Jerry would merely “text” his boss.  Oh yeah speaking of technology join our Facebook Page or our newsletter… we promise endless amounts of technological joy if you join!

Lunch just outside Yosemite Nat’l Park

By the time we got to Yosemite, we had already had an amazing interview with Allen Steck and Tom Frost (who took us out to Mexican for dinner, by the way – woopee!). We arrived at the park to find (not to our surprise) that all campsites were taken. We just weren’t getting any lucky breaks in the golden state! There were too many of us to crash Camp4, so we went to plan B – get a hold of our camp Curry employee friends and see what we could do.

We ended up driving the van into camp curry employee parking (after being stopped by a police car in the park when we attempted a failed u-turn…OF COURSE.) Signs everywhere read “employee parking only” and “not sleeping in cars” and finally “no food in cars.” I had seen the damage to my friend Thanh’s jeep only some months early (he had left a can of food, and the bear broke through his passenger side window for it.) So, I knew that we were basically breaking every rule the park (rightfully) had. But, that’s how it goes! We didn’t want to attract too much attention to ourselves *sleeping in the van* in employee parking, so we didn’t raise the pop top the whole way. Nick and Alex (who had the top bunk) hoisted it only an inch above their face, and used the camera tripod to prop it up. A long, cold night of precipitation touching their noses ensued. Down below, with me and Corene in the bottom bunk, a long night thinking every bump was most certainly a bear trying to break in to our honey-laden van occurred.

Our view from the camp curry parking lot…where’s da bears?

Crew quarters.  Amazed that my crew put up with this for 30+ days.

We made it through the night, and in fact, through Yosemite. We interviewed Ron Kauk and Ken Yager before moving on to our last California destination of Mammoth Lakes/Bishop.

When we interviewed Ron in his backyard right outside the park, there was an insurgency of mosquitos. Ron is not into mosquito spray – and at first I tried to go along with it. But, damn, after about 5 minutes of itchy swelling swatting, I couldn’t help myself. Ron remained steadfast, and continued the entire interview au natural. There were mosquitos visibly landing and feasting on Ron while he interviewew. “Why didn’t you tell me I had a mosquito right in the middle of my forehead?!” he said. Well, I tried. I really did. I told him the first few times, and then I tried motioning. But he didn’t seem to mind, and they sure didn’t want to relent, so I continued the interview amidst a cloud of mosquitos landing intermittently on Ron Kauk’s face. “Don’t worry, we’ll cgi those out.”

Our trip ended with a special California homecoming: the 50th Year Anniversary of the first ascent of the Nose of El Capitan by Warren Harding and his mix of ragtag partners (including Wayne Merry, George Whitmore, Allen Steck, Mark Powell, Wally Reed, Rich Calderwood, and Dolt Feuror).

Unfortunately, Warren passed away a few years ago so he wasn’t around to see this event or hear that Congress had named his ascent a Historic Event (though I bet he would have laughed, as did Wayne Merry, upon hearing this).

Harding was known for his affection for (among other things) wine. He was known to haul wine and wine glass up 3,000 feet just to toast on a bivvy ledge. And so the entire auditorium poured out a glass of wine (provided free by the Yosemite Climber’s Association headed by Ken Yager who set all this up) and toasted in his honor.

From left to right, the ascent team: Powell, Reed, Whitmore, Steck, Ellen Searby (behind Yager), Calderwood, and Merry.

All kinds of faces from climbing were around for the event: the ever gracious Royal Robbins, Sybille Hechtel, Don Lauria, Jerry Galwas, my old friends Joe McKeown & Fam, Doug Robinson, Ron Kauk, etc…It was a veritable reunion of all those who love Yosemite. I went with my father, as it was also his birthday weekend, and the climbing and roadside chats with people he hadn’t seen for maybe 30 years (Sybille, Ron) was a surefire way to stir up some good stories.

Ron spotted my van and left this on the windshield - evidently he was out at his old project that Beth Rodden had recently finished and renamed ‘Meltdown’

Here are some excerpts of the story of the Nose by Warren from Galen Rowell’s “Vertical World of Yosemite”:

It took Warren Harding about 2 years and 45 days to get up El Capitan. He faced threats from weather, injury, the National Park Service, and changed every single member of his original crew, who dropped out or left, before he would top out in 1958.

For me, this was great news.

The reason this is all good news is because it’s a reminder that big projects take hard work and determination in the face of many obstacles, and that independent resolve can get you to the top  (while still keeping good spirits and drinking gallons of cheap jug wine).

We’re kind of like the Harding team - probably above El Cap Towers, but below the 1800ft Camp IV - happy about the ground we’ve gained but realizing its going to take quite a big effort to finish.

As the New Year comes around the corner, the Portrait of the American Climber is contemplating, regrouping, and rescheming with the zest of Warren Harding peering up at El Capitan through binoculars in 1957.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

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???

Elbow Grease!

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

As I was unpacking my bag this morning from a week-long climbing trip to Yosemite, all of my stuff seemed to permeate the smells of dirt, food, the spring air and sweat. But amongst all that, there was that one overpowering familiar smell on all my clothes: campfire.

Even the biggest bah-humbug city dweller can’t deny that there is something magical about campfires, about they way they bring people together on a cold night, the way they blanket everyone in beautiful orange light.

My Yosemite trip was completed by the nightly campfire in our site at Camp 4 with guitars and mandolin that brought people from around the camp to sing and play stuff like some particularly awful renditions of Bob Dylan songs (think ‘Mr. Bojangles’ done in rounds, uninentionally) and ad lib blues songs about off-width cracks.

In the morning, some people would stop by again around propane stoves, and as I would drink coffee and eat my eggs, they’d spell out what they planned to climb, exchanging some tips, occasionally signin on to somebody elses route, and be off until the end of the day, when we’d meet again at the campfire. The Camp 4 appeal, after fifty years, is still around.

From Thanh, practically a Camp 4 resident with his stories of rattlesnake bites and epics and remarkable memory for visualizing climbs, to Trevor & Javier from Idaho improving their trad technique, to Anna from SB just takin in the air, to Max, the wildlife biologist with an abnormal attraction to off-width cracks, I found myself surprisingly sad this morning when I woke up and didn’t hear them cooking outside my tent, but instead heard my alarm telling me I had to go to work.

At any rate, it’s this quality of the campfire that made me decide at the beginning of the brainstorming for this documentary that all the interviews with climbers should be done by campfire light or lantern light.

A huge portion of The Rock Adventure Guide consists of interviews with different people (rock climbers, outdoors enthusiasts from the 50s onward) who tell stories about life in the outdoors and on the rock. What better setting than at the side of a campfire?

Not only because it fits with the setting of the film and these characters, but also because of the aesthetic quality. Unlike bright lighting in an office or traditional interview setup (like with a swirly blue background reminiscent of your 3rd grade school pictures), a campfire provides for more a cinematic effect. A subjects face is partly lit and partly obscured in the same way that their legends are partly fact and partly myth.  You wouldn’t film Paul Bunyon or Johhny Appleseed in a studio with three point lighting, imagine how dissapointed you would be!  The same is true of the figures we plan to interview for this documentary.