Climbing "Player" Profile: Justin Jaeger - VOLUME 1 - SEPTEMBER, 2006

And how does that compare to your hardest ascent?  Because it’s one thing to climb V7 if you climb V16, but it’s a completely different ballgame when V7 and V8 are actually difficult for you.
It’s really difficult for me to say ... despite spending some time on 7s, I feel like I have to try hard on every climb I do, regardless of grade.  Also, I still do not have a solid idea of what “V7” should feel like.  What I do know is that all of my hardest sends felt like I was going to blow it at any moment, but I just kept locking off and pulling and straining through it all ... hoping for some bit of luck.

For example — and for better or worse — one of the hardest lines I’ve ever done is a reverse-variation eliminate traverse link-up. Anyway, after much research my good friend Chip Phillips had determined that either Skip Guerin or no one had linked the reverse undercling traverse into the historical eliminate known as the Low Cloud Shadow traverse at Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder.  I was taking my bar exam referesher at the law school in Boulder and decided that I would give the slimy, sharp, endless rig all sorts of hell before, during, and after my classes.  So, I did.  For 11 semi-consecutive days of racing laps up and down Flagstaff during lunch and after class, battling pump and grease in the 95-degree heat, only to return with bloody digits and a grin after figuring out some obscure bit of Beta to save power for the send.  Finally, on the twelfth day, I was racing a thunderstorm and was able to stick the final move between drops of rain.  It felt amazing. 

Describe your typical day of climbing.
I’m not really sure there’s a typical day. Before I had found some folks keen on sessioning with me after work, I would typically speed home at about 6 p.m., get to Castlewood with one of my dogs by 6:30, jog to my day’s project with three to four crashpads all lashed together, and go straight at it until dark or until it started raining too much to keep going. Now the sessions are a bit more mellow, but more fun because I get to play tour guide and Betaman while watching some friends crush.

When I was working at REI in Boulder before finishing law school, I used to have scabs and color-scars on my shoulders from always being late for work, needing to jog w/ a couple pads down from the flatirons and such. I remember all the dogs used to bark at me as I jogged out of the woods because of my huge pad and the insane slapping of my flip-flops. More than once I would try to dance around some folks while in full stride and totally eat it cause my flip-flops would skate on the loose gravel... the people would just shake their heads thinking I was a fool/berzerker — but it was Boulder, so I was still shooting par, I think.

As far as road trips, I’ve never been on one longer than four days, so I always feel like I need to keep the same schedule: wake up as early as we can and blitz the area till dark.  Our last trip was in mid-August to Crested Butte, Colorado.  It was my friend Chip’s bachelor session so he Marcelo, and Mike Hickey stayed up talking shop and drinking drinks for a while after we arrived on Friday night.  I was all serious about getting some sleep for an early departure to the boulders, but all the tent-side chatter kept me up and I started to get really bitchy.  Finally, the drunkards decided that I should be up.  Period.  So we all agreed to do the most logical compromise—start our session there and then.  Even though it took us about two hours to drive four miles and walk two, we were still climbing before 5 a.m. by headlamp after not sleeping.  I think we had done all the problems on the Hone Stone before dawn, save for the sit starts.  Regardless, we were out climbing until about 7 p.m. that day. And my first trip to Joe’s valley: driving solo by 3 a.m. Saturday morning, climbing by 10 a.m. and driving back to Denver at 3am on Monday morning for work at 11am. And our first trip to Hueco: driving through the night in tight quarters, climbing by 8 a.m. and giving it hell for two and a half days before racing back.