2/13/07

     Another hallmark holiday is here. All of these commercial, consumer holidays usually just make me want to puke. Greeting card companies — according to the movie Fight Club — invented Valentine's Day.

     This weekend our good friends Cary and Damo flew Natasha and I down to southern California to climb in Joshua Tree. After filming us and other climbers, including Chris Lindner in J-Tree last year, they realized they needed more footage and interviews to fill in the blanks.

     They also needed me to get back on Iron Resolution. It was my third time climbing this amazing boulder, and the most amount of tries it took me to repeat it. The first time I sent it (and the first time I repeated it), I did it first try of the day. But, this time, it took me several tries to do, and I was getting pretty frustrated, thinking I wasn’t going to be able to do it again.

     For those of you who have never heard of or seen this climb the story goes like this: This boulder (in the Barker Dam area that held two Tony Yinaro offwidths on either side) fell over after a prolonged rainstorm, like, four years ago and revealed an unbelievable wall that had been flush against another rock. (You can actually see a couple bolts on the underside of the boulder.) The angles on the wall are almost perfectly flat, which makes it really unique. I can easily say it’s the most incredible, beautiful and fun to climb problems (apart from a couple in the Buttermilks) I have ever done ... three times, now.