Spring Thoughts

The weather is beginning to change finally. A hard winter is shifting to spring and the promise of movement out of doors. I'm looking forward to some climbing and hill-running soon and the chance to awaken some long-dormant feelings and muscles. I've been working on climbing inside but despite the usefulness of climbing in gyms, I really want to get on some real rock.

This is a photograph of my wife leading a great pitch called Empire of the Fenceless at a cliff called Easter Rock in Boulder Canyon. She's at the crux which is just the point at which the creek becomes loudest as you stand about 200 feet above the creekbed. It's too cold for Easter Rock right now but soon enough we'll be back. We have an extra technical difficulty to master first, though. The logistics of moving an infant to a climbing area around here are daunting but we will work on it





I've been reading a couple of other blogs on climbing/bouldering recently and wonder about how climbing and the Internet have intersected. Jamie Emerson used the phrase "problem of the week" to describe a resurrected problem in Boulder Canyon, that now has at least two names. With climbing on the web, knowledge of problems becomes much more fluid as they pass through phases of popularity, shared through word of mouth, posted on the web, and then become out of fashion. I have always wondered whether climbers really reflect on the contrasts between the motions of climbing and the solidity of rock, the curious wedding of opposites between static and transitory modes of being.