It’s ON!

Since I last posted I quit my job, flew home, and sent my belongings on their way to ATL, Georgia. I’m home for a week hanging out with family and friends before I depart for Europe on Tuesday. Yesterday I headed out to Horse Pens with some good friends. Matt and John went all out toting a crane, several cameras, lenses, tripods, etc out to the boulderfield. We had the whole place to ourselves and the weather was perfect! I enjoyed a stellar day of climbing and we got a lot of cool footage of classic three star lines. The good news is that I felt no pain from my finger so the month of rest paid off! I’m more psyched than ever for font and the rest of the trip!!

I’ll post the Horse Pens video whenever they finish creating it so stayed tuned!

To tide you over, here is one of Matt’s videos featuring three from Little Rock City.

Deception

Check out this rad video my good friend Matt Hanner put together of a problem at Little Rock City, Tennessee. He is a professional photographer in Atlanta who recently started dabbling in climbing videos. His first videos are amazing so I can’t wait to see what he produces in the future!

Space

John Hur climbs Space at Little Rock City.

Happy Holidays!

I’m in Atlanta for the holidays and luckily I had a couple of free days to go climbing. On Monday we headed up to Little Rock City which is just north of Chattanooga, TN. It was a beautiful day with a high of 50. Conditions were prime and I was psyched to get back on The Shield. Every year I come home the sandstone blows my mind. It’s so completely different from climbing anywhere out west. You can use features here that would be impossible to hold if it were granite. The rock is so smooth yet it grips like sandpaper. After warming up we headed over to the Tristar/Dragon Lady corridor. I managed to do Celestial Mechanics V7 first try which was rad. It’s one of those climbs that I could hardly pull on the starting holds a few years ago. After that a few of us started working on King James V10 which starts on the left arete and climbs up and right with a crux that is higher than the finishing hold of Celestial. On my first try I climbed up the arete and then over onto cool blocky features and made the big cross at the top to gain a small three finger edge but fell trying to grab the next hold. On my next go I grabbed the same three finger edge and committed to grabbing the positive right hand hold. At this point I tried to swing my foot out right to a ledge but couldn’t immediately place it there so I had to fight to hold the swing on the tiny crimp. Mid-swing I heard a pop from my left hand…

Continue Reading…

The South

I wanted to share a video by Andrew Kornylak (amazing photographer and filmmaker) that will give you an idea of what the south is like (if you haven’t had the pleasure of climbing there). This is part of a series of videos made for the Triple Crown to show competitors the beta for a few classic lines at Hound Ears, Horse Pens, and Little Rock City (aka The Stone Fort).

Also, if you’ve had any difficulty watching my videos, you can download them from vimeo by clicking the download file link at the bottom right of each videos’ page. I deleted Big Greenie from the side bar since it was causing issues but you can see a bigger version of it in this post.