Bloopers

When the shoot hits the fan

When I hang out with other pro climbing photographers, we don’t talk about things like f/stops, shutter speeds, or the newest and lightest camera body. Catching up over drinks by an open f re at Indian Creek or at some lame industry party at the Salt Lake trade show, we talk shit. Sometimes literally. This is not a story about how professional climbing photographers capture the ultimate climbing moment. These are our tales of comedy and peril—and shit.

Andrew Burr smelled it and dealt with it when he served the world a video of Jason Kruk crapping his pants on an offwidth lead at Squamish, British Columbia. (See the video here). “It was Cedar Wright’s video shoot, and I was just poaching some stills and staying out of the way,” says Burr. “Kruk was hammered on the approach. He totally reeked of booze, and kept lamenting on how hungover he was.”

Kruk started out cruising the climb, but then his knee got wedged into the wide crack. Wright rapped out of his perch in a tree to give his mate a hand, while Burr hung out above and watched it all unfold. Climbers on the ground began to form a peanut gallery as Wright tried to help Kruk pull his knee out by force. “I wasn’t getting anything worth a damn with the stills,” says Burr, “so I decided to switch to video mode.”

As is evident in the resulting YouTube sensation, Kruk started freaking out. The exhaustion, the booze—the whole situation had become a witch’s brew. Suddenly, Kruk announced that he’d shit his pants. At first, Burr thought he was joking, but seconds later the video image started shaking as Burr cracked up. The only detail not captured for posterity was the smell of it, which Burr called, “10 times worse than any outhouse experience.”