Saturday, April 02, 2011

Doing it right.

Here's a complicated route with difficult gear on bad rock, and the guys keep it together well enough to re-climb pitches multiple times etc. I'd call this "not sucking," and doing a solid job of it. You can see every stick in the ice is solid--Raph gives each one a good "jerk," and even on the video you can hear the hum of the tools sticking in. This is a dangerous climb, but it's dangerous because of the route, not the errors the climbers are making. And Raph and Jerome are up to the task obviously. The lack of ego is also nice; this route is about as hard as it gets in terms of trad-proteced routes on Rockies limestone, but there's not too much BS. The cat is of course weird. Nice work gentlemen.



More info here. Nice one Raph, Grant, Pierre, Wiktor, Jerome and whoever else Raph snagglled into heading up Storm Creek.

2 comments:

Juho Risku said...

Definitely nice work. I would love to see more videos that demonstrate the ice climbing excellence, especially when it comes to sticks. :-) Thanks for this one.

Kim Graves said...

Will, LOL. How do you know when you've lost perspective as a climber? When you find a hairless cat more weird than grown men climbing hard rock and ice for fun. ;-)

How's the little one doing?

Best, Kim